MAIN > SPOTLIGHT ARCHIVE > Howard_Gardner (Mar 25)

Tuesday 25th March 2008 8:00 am

[Reblogged] Howard Gardner: The End of Literacy? Don’t Stop Reading.

Howard Gardner asks “What will happen to reading and writing in our time?” We reblog his piece from the Washington Post last month that examines the future of literacy. Howard Gardner is Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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Could the doomsayers be right? Computers, they maintain, are destroying literacy. The signs—students’ declining reading scores, the drop in leisure reading to just minutes a week, the fact that half the adult population reads no books in a year—are all pointing to the day when a literate American culture becomes a distant memory. By contract, optimists foresee the Internet ushering in a new, vibrant participatory culture of words. Will they carry the day?
Maybe neither. Let me suggest a third possibility: Literacy—or an ensemble of literacies—will continue to thrive, but in forms and formats we can’t yet envision.  Read more.

Editor’s Note: Read Howard Gardner’s recent posts on Spotlight here and here. 

Category: Civic-Engagement, Credibility, Ecology-of-Games, Identity, Race-Ethnicity, Unexpected

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